It seemed to Fortunata then that she would do well to be a little afraid, but all she could feel was a baffled sadness that chilled her to the heart. She heard her own voice saying: “Had Aldwin meddled secretly? Was that what ailed him?”
Jevan braced his shoulders back against the door, and stood staring at her with stubborn forbearance, as though dealing with someone unaccountably turned idiot, but his consciously patient smile remained fixed and strained, like a convulsion of agony.
“You are talking in riddles,” he said. “What has this to do with Aldwin? I can’t guess what strange fancy you’ve got into your head, but it is an illusion. If I choose to show the gem you gave me to a friend who would appreciate it, does that mislead you into thinking I have somehow misprised or misused it?”
“Oh, no!” said Fortunata in the flat tone of helpless despair. “It will not do! Today you have been nowhere but here, not alone. If there had been no more than that, you would have taken book and all to show, you would have said what you were about. And you would not have followed me here! It was a mistake! You should have waited. I’ve found nothing. But by your coming I do know now there is something here to be found. Why else should you trouble what I did?” A sudden gust of rage took her at his immovable and self-deceiving attempt at condescension, which struggled and failed to diminish her. “Why do we keep pretending?” she cried. “What is the use? If I had known I would have given you the book, or taken your price for it if that was what you wanted. But now there’s murder, murder, murder in between us, and there’s no turning back or putting that away out of mind. And you know it as well as I. Why do we not speak openly? We cannot stay here forever, unable to go forward or back. Tell me, what are we to do now?”
But that was what neither he nor she could answer. Her hands were tied like his, they were suspended in limbo together, and neither of them could cut the cord that fettered them. He would have to kill, she would have to denounce, before either of them could ever be free again, and neither of them could do it, and neither of them, in the end, would be able to refrain. There was no answer. He drew deep breath, and uttered something like a groan.
“You meant that? You could forgive me for robbing you?”
“Without a thought! What you took from me I can do without. But what you took from Aldwin there’s no replacing, and no one who is not Aldwin has the right to forgive it.”
“How do you know,” he demanded with abrupt ferocity, “that I ever did any harm to Aldwin?”
“Because if you had not, you would have denied it here and now, in defiance of what I may believe I know. Oh, why, why? But for that I could have held my tongue. For you I would have! But what had Aldwin ever done, to come by such a death?”
“He opened the box,” said Jevan starkly, “and looked inside. No one else knew. When it was opened before us all he would have blabbed it out. Now you have it! An inquisitive fool who walked in my way, and he could have betrayed me, and I should have lost it lost it forever. It was the box, the box that made me marvel. And he was before me, and had seen what afterward I saw and coveted!”
Long, heavy silences had broken the low, furious thread of this speech, as if for minutes at a time he forgot where he was, and what manner of audience he was addressing. Outside, the light was gently dimming. Within, the lamp began to burn lower. It seemed to Fortunata that they had been there together for a very long time.
“I had only until Girard came home. I took it that very night, and put what I had in its place. I did not want to cheat you of all, I paid what I had. But then there was Aldwin. When could he ever keep to himself anything he knew? And my brother on his way home“
Another haunted silence, in which he began to stir from his post by the door, moving restlessly the length of the room, past where she sat almost forgotten, silent and still.
“When he went running back after Elave, that day, I had almost grown reconciled. My word against his! A risk
but almost I came to terms with it. Even now - do you see it? - all this is my word against yours, if you so choose!” He said it without emphasis, almost indifferently. But he had remembered her again, a danger like the other. His unquiet prowling drove him back to the table. He ran the hand that was not clutching the key along the rack of his knives, in a kind of absent caress for a profession he had enjoyed and at which he had excelled.
“In the end it was pure chance. Can you believe that? Chance that I had the knife. It was no lie, I came out here to work that afternoon. I had been using a knife - this knife“
Time and silence hung for a long while as he took it from the rack and drew it slowly out of its leather sheath, running long fingers down the thin, sharp blade.
“I had the sheath strapped to my belt. I forgot and left it there when I locked up to go home. And I thought I would go on through the town and go to Vespers at Holy Cross, seeing it was the day of Saint Winifred’s translation“
He turned to look at her, darkly and intently, she sitting there slender and still on the chest beside the lamp, her grave eyes fixed unwaveringly on him. Just once he saw her glance down briefly at the knife in his hand. He turned the blade thoughtfully to catch the light. Now how easily he could end her, take the prize for which he had killed, and set out towards the west, as many and many a wanted man had done from here before him. Wales was not far, fugitives crossed that border both ways at need. But more is needed than mere opportunity. Time was passing, and it seemed this deadlock must last forever, in a kind of self-created purgatory.
“I came late, they were all within, I heard the chanting. And then he came out from the little door that leads to the priest’s room! If he had not, I should have gone into the church, and there would have been no death. Do you believe that?”
Once again he had remembered her fully, as the niece of whom he had been humanly fond. And this time he wanted a reply; there was hunger in the very vibration of his voice.
“Yes,” she said, “I do believe it.”
“But he came. And seeing he turned towards the town, to go home, I changed my mind. It happens in a moment, in a breath, and everything is changed. I fell in beside him and went with him. There was no one to see, they were all in the church. And I remembered the knife - this knife! It was very simple, nothing unseemly. He was just newly confessed and shriven, as near content as ever I knew him. At the head of the path down to the riverside I slid it into him, and drew him away in my arm down through the bushes, down to the boat under the bridge. It was still almost full daylight then. I hid him there until dark. So there was no one left to betray me.”
“Except yourself,” she said, “and now me.”
“And you will not,” said Jevan. “You cannot any more than I can kill you“
This time the silence was longer and even more strained, and the close, stifling air within the room dulled Fortunata’s senses. It was as if they had shut themselves forever into a closed world where no one else could come, to shatter the tension between them and set them free to move again, to act, to go forward or back. Jevan began once more to pace the floor, turning and twisting at every few steps as though intense pain convulsed him. It went on for a long time, before he suddenly halted, and lowering with a long sigh the hands that still gripped the knife and the key, went on as though only a second had passed since he last spoke:
“... and yet in the end one of us will have to give way. There is no one else to deliver us.”
He had barely uttered it when a fist banged briskly at the door, and Hugh Beringar’s voice called loudly and cheerfully: “Are you within there, Master Jevan? I saw your light through the shutters. I brought your kin some good news a while ago, but you weren’t there to hear it. Open the door and hear it now!”